With Easter just around the corner, we could all use a reminder to avoid the worldly temptations of jelly beans and plastic eggs and focus on the holiday’s true meaning: sticking it to King Arthur.
Allow me to clarify, as you’d be forgiven for thinking that a faith-based film coming out at the holiest time of year called “The King of Kings” was exclusively about Jesus Christ, and not the parenting struggles faced by Charles Dickens. But life is full of surprises, and Seong-ho Jang’s Angel Studios effort begins with Ebenezer Scrooge confronting the scary revelations shown to him by the Ghost of Christmas Future in a snowy graveyard. Then we learn that it wasn’t actually Scrooge, but the man who created him.
It’s the mid-1800s and Charles Dickens (Kenneth Branagh) is struggling to work his way through a staged reading of his new Christmas novel because he’s distracted by his young son Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) pretending he’s King Arthur backstage. Dickens decides to put an end to the madness caused by the boy’s love of knights and chivalry once and for all by telling him a better story. To which Walter cheekily responds “If it’s not about a king, I’m not interested.”
That’s our entry into “The King of Kings,” which turns into a feature-length lesson about Jesus’ greatest hits with a couple throwback Judaism homages from the Old Testament thrown in for good measure. Yet even after that ham-fisted intro, the film still features way more Charles Dickens shitting on King Arthur than you could possibly be imagining. Dickens doesn’t just narrate the story of Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac), but him and Walter appear alongside the Son of God and watch him work all of his miracles from a distance while Charles makes comments like “I would argue that Satan is a little scarier than a dragon” and his kid asks when Merlin is going to show up.
The story we all know by now unfolds in a series of vignettes that covers Jesus’ birth, his childhood excursion to the temple of Jerusalem, his sermons and miracles, and his sentencing and crucifixion. Isaac and Branagh are flanked by an A-list voice cast that also includes Pierce Brosnan as Pontius Pilate, Forest Whitaker as Peter, and Mark Hamill as King Herod, but the holy trinity of Jesus, Charles, and Walter are the real stars of the show. Even if many of the theological scenes are perfectly inoffensive, the visual of watching a cartoon Jesus suffer on the cross while Charles Dickens stands 10 feet away and uses his pain as a teaching moment is not an image I ever expected to encounter.
A truly abysmal run of 21st century faith-based movies has placed us in the unenviable position of grading new ones on a curve. It’s reached the point where any movie about Jesus that doesn’t attempt to push a MAGA message about hating thy neighbor starts with a few bonus points, artistic merits be damned. (The old “it might not be ‘The Last Temptation of Christ,’ but at least it’s not ‘God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness’” argument.) That’s the case here, as “The King of Kings” does offer a theologically accurate message that’s largely about being kind and helping the needy. If you fast-forwarded through all of the Dickens nonsense, it would make an adequate introduction for a young child looking to learn the basics of the Christian faith. The animation might look like its primary influence was AI-generated memes floating around evangelical Facebook pages, but it’s clear that the people working on it had good intentions.
Which brings me back to the Dickens of it all. The choice to center a film that primarily exists as a primer on the Gospels for young viewers around the parenting struggles of a 19th century literary figure who is not exactly at the forefront of culture is inexplicable. Let’s just do the math. For every 100 Christian kids between the ages of 5 and 8, do 30 of them know about “A Christmas Carol?” And of those 30, how many are deeply familiar with the man who wrote it? Then subtract the ones who aren’t up to date on King Arthur mythology and you’re probably left with one or two literary prodigies who already know the Jesus story inside and out. Jesus’ status as an enduring symbol is partially attributable to the Gospels’ adaptability and relevance to the timeless problems that come with being a human, but I’m not sure the feeling of “my professional career is in shambles because my kid won’t shut up about King Arthur” is a universal experience.
By the time the film builds to its climactic reveal that Dickens is going to write his own children’s book about Jesus, it’s hard to muster much more of a response than “Who the hell cares?” The “Great Expectations” scribe is constantly telling his son that Jesus has a better story than King Arthur, but somebody needs to tell him that, while that might be true, there are countless takes on the story that are better than this one. But it’s not like we’re getting “The Way of the Wind” at Cannes, so anyone who was gearing up for some new Jesus cinema has to take what they can get.
Grade: C-
An Angel Studios release, “The King of Kings” is now playing in theaters.
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